Photo courtesy of Mazda
Jeffrey Fazio crosses the starting line in a Mazda MX-5 Miata at the
Performance Challenge during Mazda's Zoom-Zoom Live event Nov. 6 at
Old Bridge Township Raceway Park in Englishtown, N.J.
Mazda earns A+ on test
drive event
By
Jeffrey Fazio
DriveTime Columnist
If you are in the market to buy a performance vehicle, how great
would it be to walk into a dealership, have them hand over the keys
to a brand new sports car and insist that you go drive it as fast as
you possibly can? To make this task even better, they go through the
trouble of setting up an actual autocross course for you complete
with a timing system so you compare your times to everyone else.
What could possibly be better than that?
What if they also gave you a free hot dog, T-shirt and a
digital-photo of yourself leaving the starting line? What if they
made prizes available if you were the fastest driver? What if, in
addition to the autocross course, they offered three other driving
challenges for you to participate in during this test drive?
Oh, I almost forgot. Wouldn't this be even more fun if you could
bring your friends along and they could all play with the brand new
sports car as well?
Certainly all of that would be an awesome test-drive experience, but
what automobile manufacturer in its right mind would allow such an
experience?
On Nov. 5 and 6, Mazda held it's Zoom-Zoom Live event at Old Bridge
Township Raceway Park in Englishtown, N.J. They hold this event at
11 different cities around the country. In the past this event was
called "Rev It Up" and there was a fee to participate. This year it
was completely free. Free as in "can you believe there is anything
that is truly free?" This was.
One of my fellow hillclimb competitors, Joe Foering, invited me
along this year. He has done this event the last two years and was
on the invitation list for this year.
The event consisted of four different driver challenges. You could
enter each event as many times as you felt like waiting in line for
it. However, they only counted your first two attempts in a given
challenge toward your overall points for prizes.
The Performance Challenge consisted of a short autocross course that
took the good drivers around 30 seconds to complete. There was a row
of six or seven brand new Mazda MX-5 Miatas for everyone to take
turns racing through the course. I only took one shot at the course
and the Miata was truly awesome. It was incredibly responsive and
the brakes were amazing.
Unfortunately there was a big discrepancy in the time the finish
line worker told me I achieved and what was actually recorded on the
official results. Regardless, I was no where near the fastest
drivers which was not a surprise considering my lack of experience
with the car.
The next event was the Match Time Gymkhana. This was basically set
up like an autocross course but the goal was not to go as fast as
possible. The goal was to traverse the course in exactly 29 seconds.
If you tried to drive fast through this course you would easily
surpass the mark. They described the challenge as driving as if a
police officer was following you -- we didn't want to hold him up,
but we also wouldn't want to get pulled over.
For this event they had a variety of new Mazdas to choose from: MX-5
Miata, Mazda3, Mazda5 and Mazda6. Joe and I actually attempted this
challenge twice. The first time we chose the Mazda5 which seems to
be the combination of a minivan and a sport-utility vehicle. I was
extremely impressed by how nimble this vehicle was for it's size.
Taking a spunky run through the course netted me a mid-28 second run
which put me just about a half second too fast for the goal.
On our second trip through the Gymkhana course we jumped into the
Miata which was automatic, but had a manual over ride. In my haste
to stay with the pace of the event I inadvertently put the Miata
into the manual over ride which plopped the transmission into first
gear.
Needless to say that as soon as I started the course I realized the
error as the transmission refused to shift on its own and I was not
exactly in a position to "learn" how to do this while avoiding the
bright orange pylons. So my brain kicked in and said I did not need
to be going that fast for this course anyway so I relaxed and let
the thing rev high while I scooted around the course in 1st gear.
Right before the finish I was concerned that I was going too fast so
I let off the gas and coasted across the finish line just over 29
seconds from when I started.
The third event was by far the most entertaining for me. This was
the JinbaIttai Experience: an extremely short autocross course with
a target time of 20 seconds. The goal was to go as fast as possible,
but the catch was how they forced you to be smooth.
This event was done with a variety of Miatas that were specially
outfitted with two bowls mounted inside of each other on top of the
hood. The largest bowl looked like a clear, extra large salad bowl.
Mounted inside of that bowl and slightly raised up was a smaller
clear plastic bowl containing three white golf balls. For every golf
ball that rolled out of the small bowl into the large bowl there was
a time penalty.
I managed to only lose one ball throughout most of the course as I
snuck through a 20.1 second run. As life would have it, right at the
finish I took one last tug on the steering and jerked the last two
golf balls out of the small bowl. The finish line worker promptly
exclaimed, "Great time, but you lost all of your balls."
Such is life.
The last event was the School of Zoom. Unfortunately we did not have
time to take part in this. This was a brief high performance school
that was taken in two parts. The first part was class room
instruction and the second part took place on a higher speed course
with an instructor. They were using the new RX8s for that course. As
much as we would have loved to thrash an RX8 around the course, the
lines were just too long.
My only real critique of the event was the long lines. It seems to
me that it would have made more sense to allow each driver to take
both of their two scored runs at the same time since they were
already seated in the car instead of forcing everyone to wait in the
same lines twice. I would further suggest limiting people to only
two runs as it appeared that some people were obsessing on one
particular course which made the lines longer than necessary.
For more information on this event and to keep an eye on future
events, check out:
https://www.zoomzoomlive.com
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